Is it good or bad for the users? I don’t think anybody can vote on this yet. Unity is still new, it saw born quite recently and focused on netbooks. GNOME shell is going to change the desktop management paradigm with GNOME 3.0, like KDE 4.0 did. Either way, the GNOME experience on Ubuntu is going to change. So, both of them are posed to newly gain their fans and critics.

The GNOME community should not mind this. An alternative is always welcome in the Linux world.

The one thing that I haven’t seen is the reason behind the switch. Is it because of the technologies used? Or fear of the new experience with GNOME 3.0? Or better integration with Ubuntu’s own tools, like the Me Menu?

Whatever it is, I hope that Ubuntu will continue to offer one of the biggest features of Linux – swap components easily. So, if the default shell is Unity, a Ubuntu user who prefers GNOME shell will be able to switch to that with a command or two without breaking anything.

I have 10.10 UNE (netbook edition) running on this Acer Aspire One and for the moment I switched back to GNOME — all I had to do was choose it on the login screen.

I think some of the Unity things are pretty cool, such as the way the dock handles multiple open application windows, but it has some quirks I never got used to, and some downright annoying bugs (such as the lack of Alt-F2). I find GNOME less efficient with the screen real estate but more comfortable, for now.

But in 10.10 UNE GNOME is still there even without adding it, and as you said it’s easy enough to add more environments; I haven’t even looked at KDE or XFCE in awhile, but it’s pretty easy to try them out when I have some “spare” time….

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